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William Cullen Bryant 




PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY. 

1888. 




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Book . Cx. 7 

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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



William Ccllen Bryant 




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PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LTPPINCOTT COMPANY. 

1888. 



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Copyright, 1888, by J. B. Lippincott Company, 



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WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 



Bryant, William Cullen, poet and journalist, was 
born of good New England stock at Cummington, Massa- 
chusetts, November 3, 1794. William was trained to 
admire the poetry of Pope, and early encouraged to imi- 
tate him. The most noted fruit of these attempts was 
The Embargo, a Satire by a Youth of Thirteen (Boston, 
1807). In 1810 he entered Williams College, but soon 
resumed his studies at home, and formed himself by 
loving study of such poets as his favourites, Blair and 
Kirke White, while watching with a keen eye the quiet 
life of nature as he rambled among the woods. His 
quickened imagination found expression in the majestic 
blank verse of Thanatopsis, which, published in the 
North American Review for September 1817, was at once 
acknowledged to surpass in grandeur and beauty any- 
thing previously written by an American. Meantime 
Bryant had studied law, had been admitted to the bar, 
and had settled at Great Barrington. Being called to 
contribute further to the Review, he sent both verse and 
prose; among the former Lines to a Water-fowl, and 
among the latter a criticism on American poetry. In 
1821 he delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society 
at Harvard a poem in Spenserian verse called The Ages. 
In the same year he was married to Miss Frances Fair- 
child, who inspired his poem Fairest of the Rural 



4 WILLIAM CULL EN BRYANT. 

Maids; but he also lost his father, to whom he paid a 
tribute in his Hymn to Death. Other noted poems of 
this time are: The Rivulet, The West Wind, Green River, 
The Forest Hymn, and June, which were published in 
Boston periodicals. In 1825 the poet was induced by 
his friends to remove to New York to become editor of 
The New York Review, and when it failed a year later, 
he was made assistant-editor of the Evening Post. In 
1829 Bryant became editor-in-chief, and by his ability, 
dignity, and steady adherence to principle, did much to 
raise the tone of the daily press. A collection of his 
poems was published in 1832, and, on its republication in 
England through Washington Irving, received favour- 
able notice from Blackwood's Magazine. Bryant was 
now, however, absorbed in journalism. His paper was 
democratic in politics, but when the slavery question 
became prominent it inclined to the anti-slavery side, 
and in 1856 it assisted in forming the Republican party. 
As editor of an influential paper, Bryant was often called 
upon to make public addresses. A volume of these ad- 
dresses was published in 1873. His visits to Europe, 
the West Indies, and many parts of the United States, 
gave occasion for letters to his paper, which were repub- 
lished, making three volumes. Meantime his poems had 
sunk deeply into the minds of his countrymen, and 
several editions, some of which were finely illustrated, 
were issued. In his old age, when relieved of the more 
pressing demands of a daily newspaper, he again per- 
mitted the deeper emotions of his heart to flow in verse. 
The poems of his age bear striking resemblance to those 
of his youth ; they have the same grand simplicity, 
transparent clearness, wide generalisation. Sometimes, 



WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. 5 

as in Robert of Lincoln and The Planting of an Apple- 
tree, he seemed to strike off a more airy and musical 
lyric than ever before. At seventy-two he commenced a 
translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in English 
blank verse, which proved as inadequate as that of many 
greater men before him. Almost his last poem was The 
Flood of Years, a noble counterpart to Thanatopsis. On 
May 29, 1878, Bryant delivered an eloquent address at 
the unveiling of a bust of Mazzini, in Central Park, 
New York. After its close, as he was entering a house, 
he fell on the doorstep, receiving injuries of which he 
died June 12. His complete works were published in 4 
vols. (1883-84) ; his Life was written by his son-in-law, 
Parke Godwin (2 vols. 1883), and other volumes relating 
to his life and works have been published. 



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